Student Loan Debt

Sunday, July 31, 2011

Barack Obama’s vulgar Twitter spamming campaign

The Washington Post and a number of US news sites are reporting that tens of thousands of Twitter users have unfollowed President Obama after being deluged by tweets on Friday requesting they contact Republican legislators over the debt ceiling issue. According to The Post:
Obama’s official 2012 campaign Twitter account announced to its 9.4 million followers that it would begin publishing the Twitter account names of House Republicans. Over the course of the day, @BarackObama sent out around 100 tweets.
Not everyone was enamored. The account stood at 9.366 million followers by 6 p.m., a loss of more than 30,000 followers. The White House’s official account, @whitehouse, was also publishing tweets at a rapid-fire pace throughout the day.
One would have thought the leader of the free world might have better things to do with his time than spam Twitter with highly partisan tweets that quickly became a major annoyance, the online equivalent of receiving voluminous amounts of junk mail through the post. With the United States facing the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression due to towering mountains of federal debt (much of it racked up by his own administration), the president should be actively thinking of ways to reduce the size of government, cut the budget deficit and spur job growth, instead of flooding social media with politically charged propaganda.
As the president’s approval rating slips to a dismal 40 percent in the latest Gallup poll, the spin-obsessed White House only looks further out of touch with reality in a nation where 75 percent of likely voters believe the country is moving down the wrong direction. This latest Twitter campaign merely comes across as yet another act of desperation from a presidency whose mantra is increasingly “leading from behind,” both at home and abroad.